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The Rosary and Human Nature
By Thomas Storck
On earth happiness will always be tempered by suffering, as we see in the life of Christ.
Catholic Way -
How can we find happiness on earth? Thomas Storck writes that one of the first things we need is an understanding that there is no perfect communion with nature that will give us perfect happiness. The mysteries of the Rosary show us that here on earth happiness will always be tempered by some degree of suffering, as we see in the life of Christ. The path of Christ involves sorrow, but it is also the real path to joy, both in this life and the next.
Some people think that before Jesus Christ founded the Catholic church, mankind existed in a sort of happy, merry paganism, delightfully doing all those things that Catholics came along and branded as sins. The 19th century English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, who loved to write about such pagan themes as "The laurel, the palms, and the paen, the breasts of the nymphs in the brake" also wrote the famous line, "Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown gray from thy breath." Christianity had come along and cast its dreary spell over the world and the happy frolics with the nymphs in the woods were over.
Many people today think the same thing. And so if they can only get rid of their Christian attitudes, they can make this direct connection to nature and happiness and forget all the Christian notions of guilt and sin. Even some who embrace witchcraft claim to see things this way.
"To [Gerald Gardner], Witchcraft was a peaceful, happy nature religion," writes Adler of Gardner. "Witches met in covens, led by a priestess. They focused primarily on the Goddess; they celebrated the eight ancient Pagan festivals of Europe and sought to attune themselves to nature."
If only we got close to nature, maybe worshipped nature, we would be happy and free of guilt. We could be ourselves.
All that I said in my last article shows how false this view is. But now I want to focus on how the rosary also takes up these themes and shows their falsity. The first set of mysteries of the rosary is, of course, the joyful. And here, if anywhere, one could hope to find that joyous direct communion with nature and natural things that Swinburne and so many others are desperately seeking. The stories of the joyful mysteries: the angelic announcement that Mary will give birth, the visit to Elizabeth, the indescribable charm of the Nativity narrative, the presentation and the finding in the Temple. Are not most of these the stuff of Christmas cards, things that everyone can appreciate, because they are simply the joys natural to mankind, mothers, babies, animals, shepherds?
Well, yes, there is certainly this element to the joyful mysteries, but if we probe even a bit, we find that the joy is tempered by something else. In the fourth joyful mystery, Simeon says to Mary, "Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is spoken against, and a sword will pierce through your own soul also" (Luke 2:34-35). And shortly after the charming account of the Nativity related by St. Luke, we have another story from St. Matthew, the story of the slaughter of the innocents by King Herod. In other words, though these mysteries may be joyful, they are told against a background of evil and sorrow. That is because Jesus Christ came, even as a little babe in the cradle, to die and redeem mankind, to pay the price for our sins. Although the Christmas narratives are surely among the most delightful in the world, if we forget the dark shadow of Herod and the even darker shadow of Calvary, we do not understand them. We make of them simply cute and, ultimately, trivial stories.
This is why, then, the attempt to make a direct connection with nature and simply live happy, spontaneous lives is impossible to mankind since the Fall. Original sin has guaranteed that men will turn to evil. Indeed, ancient paganism was not chiefly revelings in the woods as Swinburne imagines, but cruelty, civil strife, conquest, slavery, and fear of dark forces. When the Catholic faith came, men saw it as the Good News, not as something that made the world grow gray. And of course, the sorrowful mysteries make all this even clearer. And it is only after the sorrow that we have the glory. Only after the final triumph of Jesus Christ will the joy of mankind be unmixed with sorrow. Until then, much of the lives of Adam's offspring will be suffering and sorrow, a valley of tears.
Because the view that somehow the Church has cast a wet blanket over mankind's pleasures is so common, it is well, when we pray the holy rosary, to sometimes focus on this specific truth: that for us in this world, joy can never be that absolute and direct communion with nature that some people think the pagans had. It is never far from sorrow. Not because God desires His people to suffer. But because the way of redemption that God offers is His own way, the following of Himself to the Cross. Only in this way can there be joy—joy here and joy in eternity.
Copyright © 2000 Thomas Storck
Thomas Storck, a convert to the Catholic faith from the Episcopal Church, is the author of The Catholic Milieu (1987), Foundations of a Catholic Political Order (1998) and the newly released Christendom and the West (2000), as well as numerous articles and reviews on the subjects of Catholic culture and social teaching. He is a contributing editor of New Oxford Review and a member of the editorial board of The Chesterton Review and has taught history at Christendom College and philosophy at Mount Aloysius College and Catonsville Community College.
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What Happened To George?
A funny thing happened to George Washington, Surveyor, Soldier, Leader on its way to publication.
For some undisclosed reason, I found it necessary to purchase my own proof copy after the book had already been released. Upon reviewing the print issue, I discovered some serious errors. Well, to me they were serious. Correctable errors in formatting like incorrect page numbering and incorrect placement of objects on the cover. Most disturbing was a Publisher's Note inserted at the front of the book. In it, my book was described as fiction and stated all people, places and incidents were the work of the author's imagination. This notice came at quite a shock since I'd spent months in research, even purchased a copy of George Washington's own diary to be certain what I wrote was historically accurate.
I contacted my publisher at Dancing With Bear Publishing, listing the needed corrections and even offering to send directions for making the corrections. Since the services of CreateSpace was used to produce the book and I was familiar with their procedures, I knew all it would take was correcting the manuscript and re-submitting it.
Her response? An offer to allow me to buy out my contract at a substantial sum. I turned down the offer, replying that I wished only to produce a book that reflected professionalism.
That was when I received a second offer of release from the contract stating a list of charges I would be responsible for. I won't go into the ludicrous details.
When I turned that down, her reply was an expansive email canceling of my contract and accusing me of being an "author diva."
So, unfortunately I've requested that Amazon remove the print copy of the book from their shelves. I have a couple copies to sell as long as they last and have already gotten a request for one. But there's just a few and they are going fast.
Meanwhile - to those customers who purchased a copy through Amazon - I'll be happy to sign what may turn out to be collector's items some day. George's story will have to go back on the shelf for a while more.
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# Advice from the Lights

# Also by Stephen Burt

Poetry

Belmont

Parallel Play

Popular Music

All-Season Stephanie (chapbook)

Why I Am Not a Toddler by Cooper Bennett Burt (chapbook)

Nonfiction

The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them

The Art of the Sonnet

Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry

The Forms of Youth: Twentieth-Century Poetry and Adolescence

Randall Jarrell and His Age

# Advice from the Lights

# Poems

# STEPHEN BURT

Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2017 by Stephen Burt

The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author's copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

Published by Graywolf Press

250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

All rights reserved.

www.graywolfpress.org

Published in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-55597-789-4

Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-981-2

2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

First Graywolf Printing, 2017

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017930116

Cover design: Kapo Ng

Cover art: Shutterstock
to Cooper and Nathan and Jessie

for our present and our future

# Contents

Ice for the Ice Trade

My 1979

Hermit Crab

Princess Stephanie

A Covered Bridge in Littleton, New Hampshire

My 1980

Over Sacramento

Kites

Swans at a Pond by JFK Airport

To the Naked Mole Rats at the National Zoo

My 1981

Inside Outside Stephanie

Scarlet, a Betta

Roly-Poly Bug

After Callimachus (So reactionaries...)

Palinode with Playmobil Figurines

My 1982

Fifth Grade Time Capsule

Cloud Studies

My 1983

Black Raspberry Canes

First Kiss Stephanie

Taboos at Twelve

Esprit Stephanie

After Callimachus (Half of me...)

The Cars' Greatest Hits

Mean Girls

My 1985

Fairy Story Stephanie

Herring Gull

Electrical Flora

My 1986

Water Strider

Gymnastics Stephanie

Cicadas

My 1987

School Smoking Lounge Stephanie

Palinode with Study Guide, Spackling Knife, and Sewing Kit

After Callimachus (Why do I write?)

Sadder

A Nickel on Top of a Penny

Advice from the Lights

Anubis

Paper Stephanie

Helium

A Crime at Pattaya

The Sun Rising

Royal Botanical

Pastorale

Advice or Prayer for Airports

Indian Stream Republic

Écossaise

Spoken for a Pair of Ferrets

After Callimachus (It's hard work...)

Tiara Stephanie

Secondhand Flashlight

Creative Writing

Final Exam Stephanie

Advice for Holding Together

Tourmalines

Washingtonian

Advice from Rock Creek Park

Suspense

December 2016

Resolved

Fuzzy Golem Doll with 6" Keychain

Concord Grapes

White Lobelia

Notes

Acknowledgments
"I grew up in the human world," September said crossly.

"It's not the same," Hawthorn sighed. "You don't know what it's like to always, always feel that you don't belong, to your family, to your city, or your school, knowing there's something different about you, something off, that you're not like the others, that you're an alien all alone."

September crossed her arms. "Hawthorn. Everyone feels like that."

—Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home

I felt entirely connected to the time and place in which I was writing the songs, and so believed that those around me would feel the same as me and would understand them.

—Tracey Thorn, Bedsit Disco Queen

She would not say of anyone in the world now that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged.

—Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Nothing is everything to everyone. That is, compromises will have to be made.

—Bryan Walpert, Native Bird

# Ice for the Ice Trade

Everybody wants a piece of me.

I have been weighed and measured,

tested and standardized,

throughout my young life. It happens to everyone,

or to everyone with my ability.

Now I live quietly

and mostly in the dark, amid sawdust and sheer

or streaky wooden surfaces. My role,

when I reach maturity,

may be to help people behave

more sociably, and reduce

the irritations of summer,

or else to make it easier to eat.

For reasons I cannot fathom, I weep when it rains.

My handlers keep me wrapped in awkward cloth.

They will not let me touch my friends

or show any curves. They have taught me how to shave.

A few twigs and dragonfly wings got caught

near the center of me long ago; they serve

to distinguish me from others of my kind,

along with some bubbles of air.

I am worth more when I am clear.

When I am most desirable

you should be able to see yourself through me.

Some of my distant relatives

will probably never go far,

because they are too irregular, or opaque.

Many of us will end on a cart.

I, on the other hand, have had my work

cut out for me by so many gloves

and tongs, pallets and barges, poles and planks

that I am sure I will go to New York;

there people who own

the rights to me will give elaborate thanks

to one another, and go on to take me apart.

# My 1979

I was Mr. Spock being raised by Dr. Spock.

I was told I was free,

but only free to be me.

I knew I loved my digital clock.

I would have trusted my instincts if I had any,

or if I could have given them a name.

I was deceived by the body that I mistook for a bad penny,

by the shimmery beauty of my immediate peers,

which I mistook for fame.

By wearing them over and over without socks

I let my one pair of gold tennis shoes fall apart.

I regarded the temporary reassembly of the Styrofoam packing parts

that came with small household appliances as a fine art.

Inhabited by C-3POs, they became

starbases, or soft-focus all-white homes of the future.

I wanted to think that they had nothing to fear.

I ate peanut butter and pimento sandwiches every day for at least a week,

at most, for half a year.

I had become convinced

that character was fate.

Almost anything could result in tears.

I wanted to stay at Alison's house overnight

and wake up as a new girl, or a new mutant,

or a new kind of humanity, engineered

to travel at more than half the speed of light,

but I wasn't allowed. My bedtime and I were both eight.

# Hermit Crab

That shell is pretty, but that shell is too small for me.

Each home is a hideout; each home is a secret; each home

is a getaway under the same hot lamp, a means

to a lateral move at low velocity.

I live in a room in the room

of a boy I barely see.

Sometimes the boy and his talkative friends raise

too-warm hands and try to set me free

and I retreat into myself, hoping they place

me back in my terrarium, and they

do, with disappointed alacrity.

Scatter patterns in sand, adnates, cancellates, gaping

whelk husks, a toy tractor-trailer, cracked

and dinged, beside the spine of a plastic tree,

the helmet-shaped shelter of a shadow cast

by a not-quite-buried wedge of pottery...

if I have a body that's wholly my own

then it isn't mine. For a while I was

protected by what I pretended to be.

# Princess Stephanie

To be delicate, to be too big for the helpless, too little and too important

To have to say: help me out of this tulle dress

I know how to kiss but not how to do this slow dance

What use is the adult world? It doesn't have unicorns

Why can't I wear two different colored shoes?

# A Covered Bridge in Littleton, New Hampshire

I can remember when I wanted X

more than anything ever—for X fill in

from your own childhood

[balloon, pencil lead, trading card, shoelaces, a bow

or not to have to wear a bow]

and now I am moved to action, when I am moved,

principally by a memory of what to want.

The point is to be, in your own eyes, what you are,

or to keep your own tools, so that you can pretend.

And so it was no surprise,

to me at least, when Cooper, who is two,

collapsed in fortissimo fits when he could not have

a $20, three-foot-long stuffed frog

in the image of Frog from Frog and Toad, since he is Toad.

That morning, needing a nap,

he had thrown, from the third-story balcony

of Miller's Cafe and Bakery, into the whistling

rapids and shallows

of the Ammonoosuc River, with its arrowheads and caravans of stones,

his Red Sox cap. His hair was shining like

another planet's second sun,

as he explained, looking up, "I threw my hat in the river.

I would like my hat back now."

# My 1980

It was now my younger brothers who had

philosophical objections to taking a bath.

After I came back from the optician,

gold backs for earrings, aglets and fish scales,

erasers' edges, girls' clean fingernails,

were no longer fuzzy, a probability cloud,

but evident in separate outlines, sad

as Atari pixels with their 8-bit math.

I had not the means but the active imagination—

so adults said—to go anywhere: for example,

into the Earth's hot mantle

in a box-elder-bug-shaped burrowing ironclad.

I was the stowaway on an Edwardian liner

who knew what the locket's ancient pictographs meant,

thanks to my prior study of Egyptology,

delighting the princess by proving she was not cursed.

I was also the unaccompanied minor

afraid to look down, or out at the Atlantic,

as we began our rickety descent

toward Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.

I thought of myself as omniscient, as ichthyomantic.

I wanted to spend the following week immersed

in sea-floor adventures, a Nebula-winning tetralogy,

or swimming, as a kind of last resort.

# Over Sacramento

The sky is platinum blonde,

so bright I avert my eyes.

Everything is a staple, a fret, an acre of salt, some twine

laid flat on sand with nothing caught inside.

One part of bad news,

psychological researchers say, cancels five parts of good;

one line of will and must, of take what you get,

can cancel out a line of wish or would.

Please, everybody alive,

do your best to stay that way.

It's hard enough to grieve for talented strangers,

albeit they did not seem so. There will be no more songs

brought down to this Earth by Scott Miller of Sacramento

and Davis, CA: the author, while there,

of "Bad Year at UCLA,"

and later of "Don't Bother Me While I'm Living Forever,"

of "Song About 'Rocks Off"'—but not, of course, of "Rocks Off"—

of "I've Tried Subtlety," the least subtle

among his disgruntled effects, and of "Aerodeliria,"

which begins Aerodeliria jet ride, it don't affect me now

and whose chorus concludes I don't think we'll ever lose—no more misdirections,

intuitive puns or unfolded misconceptions,

no more mathematical games

or matrices made up of names,

nothing to graph or get lost in,

nothing else for needy, supposedly

gifted children to put that level of trust in

as of today

(and the blocky clouds fold up

as if hiding behind themselves in a rolling moiré)

who left us not so much,

or rather not only, with so many finished songs

as with the sense that he had more to say.

# Kites

Complete in ourselves,

we look like scraps of paper anyway:

left alone, we could tell

our mothers and one another our owners'

flimsiest secrets and play together all day

until we became intertwined, which is why

you try

to keep us permanently apart.

One of us is a gossamer pirate ship,

a frigate whose rigging the industrial

sunset highlights, sail by oblong sail.

Another resembles a Greek letter—gamma,

or lambda; others still

a ligature, a propeller, a fat lip.

Our will is not exactly the wind's will.

Underlined by sand,

whose modes of coagulation and cohabitation

none of the human pedestrians understand,

we take off on our almost arbitrarily

lengthy singletons of string

toward the unattainable, scarily

lofty realm of hawk and albatross

and stay, backlit by cirrocumulus.

It seems to be up to you

to keep us

up in the air, and to make sure our paths never cross.

# Swans at a Pond by JFK Airport

resemble cranes,

the construction kind; one of the pair has begun to assemble

a nest as big

as a sleeping adult human being. No rest

accrues to the

weary, if the weary are or expect to be parents; but no blues,

no keening, no

jeremiads are in order, just advice they won't hear: take it slow;

try, at least, to

make plans you won't have to keep: you, too, will cry.

Futurity

appears here as several bits of mess: split sticks, dull loot

our trenches leave,

prismatic drinking straws, and bottlenecks belie the merely emotional power

source that some of

us find in recycling, as if we could rescue a watershed by collating apple cores,

as if goodness

were easy to recognize, and the way to tell eros from caritas

elementary.

O swans, mute, self-appointed landed gentry

whose work confines

itself to the under-studied and overlooked, further reports would only confuse

us who travel

in such exhausting, overbearing vehicles, and make ourselves ridiculous

thereby. It is

not we who own the air.

# To the Naked Mole Rats at the National Zoo

Bucktoothed and semitransparent, pretty to no one,

butt of a joke and protagonist of a cartoon,

you make ridicule

seem inescapable,

not at home anywhere

sunlight might penetrate the circuitous air,

or else at home only on paper,

a mockup of a colony on the moon.

What with the light fixtures' shadows and the (exhale, inhale, exhale)

water vapor,

your tunnels look almost opaque,

their entrance strobing like a zoetrope:

some unambitious version of heaven,

or mild first level of hell. Alexander Pope,

with his grotto and chronic pain, might have had a lot

to say about your lot,

so eager to immure

one another, yet always on view

to the grade schoolers whose eyes, below woven

caps and sun hats, make a meal of you.

They could see you as unfinished, or as a mistake.

One compared you to severed toes.

Another called all of you "skin tubes," which seems apropos,

if rude; it describes us all, though your motives are pure,

your will therefore harder to break.

# My 1981

Everyone's younger sibling was still in a stroller,

learning to drink from a cup or stay in a dress.

Everyone's mom was overseeing additions

to our beige, orange, and air-conditioned kitchens,

choosing the tiles: cake batter, peach, mallow, rose-pink.

They matched the crayons that matched our skins.

Everyone's dad was a lawyer, or else in government service.

Our teachers were also moms. They returned our work

on time, with stars, in green and purple ink.

I had one friend who was actually my friend:

he liked to argue that law-abiding Americans

would end up safer if we all owned guns.

He knew about BMXes, and how to surf,

or said he did. I didn't know what to think.

Each week on TV we awaited the motorcycles

of the bold, law-abiding, wisecracking police.

All summer his little sister ran circles around us

so we decided she had to be the Flash.

After his friends' older friends

TP'd the split-level houses

beside our own, rain turned their thinning banners

the color of sunburnt, crumpled American cash.

# Inside Outside Stephanie

# 1

I made myself. Mommy and Daddy were proud, in that order.

I didn't mail myself like a letter some other kids

already knew. I learned to use stamps. They stuck to my thumb

without any glue. I didn't have any permission.

# 2

There was a snowstorm that lasted three days

and a cavern of monochrome memory. There were board games, and a

pencil-and-paper game

where the object was to figure out the object of the game.

There was a stack of broad-rule writing paper, and a stapled calendar,

and a 64-pack of sparkly rainbow crayons, to make each week look different

since they all started out black and white, and all the same.

# 3

O grapefruit (as color and flavor). O never quite rightly tied laces. O look,

up there on the uneven climbing bars,

too hot to touch where the sun touches, now that it's spring,

the shadow of a tarp, like a sail between sailors

and thin swings that make no decision, like weather vanes.

O think of the lost Chuck Taylors. The lost Mary Janes.

# Scarlet, a Betta

for Amanda Schaffer

I'm really bright blue. I keep going back and forth

between trying to live up to my name

and following my reflection, or my nature.

I know no east, no north,

no consequence, or permanence, or blame;

I regard the curious child

who feeds me as a disinterested creator,

neither beloved nor reviled.

I reserve my love

for holy Ariel,

my admiration for the king of the sea,

inch-high, great-bearded Neptune, whose silent rule

extends over bubbles, and artificial

coral, and a filtration system, and me.

All the colors I recognize are alive

in the pebbles at the bottom of my tank.

I pretend each trace or trail

I make in the clarified water

amounts to my emphatic signature,

which I have chosen to leave in invisible ink.

# Roly-Poly Bug

Non serviam

Because I can't ever appear

as I would like to appear,

I once tried to make it so you couldn't see me at all.

I named myself after a pill

but it didn't help. I liked

the feeling of feeling small,

as long as it let me feel mobile; I wanted to roll

up and down and around the tiny hall

of a groove in discarded cardboard. I used to appall

my peers with risky behavior. I might fall

to my death in a half-inch ditch

full of oil or lawnmower grease. I stall

at the brush of a fingertip. I'm so afraid

of a grand faux pas that I answer the most banal

questions by quoting the questioner, so as to let

his words shield mine. I cover my anger

imperfectly, so I can breathe

with my head between my ten legs; I am my own

backyard slat fence, my own slate garden wall.

I am chitin and ichor inside, but I'll never let on

how I look underneath. I could always make something

else of myself. I could be having a ball.

# After Callimachus

So reactionaries and radicals complain

that I have no proprietary mission,

no project that's all mine;

instead, I am like a child flipping Pogs

or building with Minecraft bricks, although I'm past forty.

To them I say: keep rolling logs

for one another, but don't waste my time

imposing your inappropriate ambition:

marathon runners and shock jocks gain

by going as far as they can, but the sublime,

the useful, and the beautiful in poetry

are all inversely correlated

with size: shorter means sweeter. I'll be fine.

When I first rated

myself as a writer of some sort,

wolf-killing, light-bearing Apollo came to me

as a ferret. Stay off crowded trains, he said; never resort

to volume where contrast will do. Imitate

Erik Satie, or Young Marble Giants. The remedy for anomie

lies in between the wing-slips of the cicada.

If I can't be weightless, or glide among twigs, or sate

myself on dew, then let

my verses live that way,

since I feel mired in age, and worse for wear.

It might even be that when the Muses visit

a girl, or a schoolboy, they intend to stay,

or else to come back, even after the poet goes gray.

# Palinode with Playmobil Figurines

They do not move. They cannot bend their knees.

When we go to bed, the Redcoats do not sit down

to a cold Sunday joint and an eighteenth-century

discussion of natural moralities.

Nor can they constitute corporations, or sail

away from us all in a catamaran

beyond the range of the ceiling fan. Their band

has never disassembled its microphone stand

in order to build a tower for 2 Hz

radio signals whose primes summon alien beings.

Their girls cannot link hands;

their smooth-faced construction workers in orange jumpsuits

with decals for zippers, their knights of suzerain lands

in smoothly painted-on armor, cannot insist

on byrnies or jazerants that nobody sees.

They do not move. They cannot bend their knees.

Their niece, with her persimmon bowl cut, never flees

her own maple-strewn backyard; she will never steal

the breeches from a stranger's line, nor find

camaraderie and peril upon the high seas.

Nor does the glossy-eyed butterfly princess pose,

still sullen, before her regent; she will never hold

her crown shakily in round fingers—more bronze than gold,

more circlet or torc than crown—nor attempt to postpone

her marriage to her scrofulous second cousin

despite their mothers' frenetic diplomacies;

her bearded, big-eyed uncle never removes

his wig, and never disagrees.

All of them know how to read. None fears the tale

of the monkey's paw, how by wishing to make

your family perfect you kill it; none of them have

to cease, or pause, their play while another one pees.

None of them know how low

the imagination recedes,

how you end up doing only what other

people remind you to do,

thus fashioning the new life to which

a responsible person cedes

in some sort of ecstatic resignation

in the same way that kids learn when to say please.

Given their hollow heads, their sturdy

cylindrical necks, they could almost know how to breathe,

though none of them breathes. They cannot bend their knees.

# My 1982

I had a future in the dark.

At Putt-Putt Mini Golf, Arcade and Recreation Park,

I stood up and twitched as if in labs' fume hoods,

divorced, like other seventh-graders' parents,

both from evil and from good.

I had to stop to pee, pull up my pants,

or unpick grit from a trackball.

Some games relied, like social life, on patterns:

remember each action and its consequence

and you would never get killed, or fail, or fall.

Others demanded adrenalin, norepinephrine,

alertness fit for national defense.

At home, I kept trying and failing to play

piano parts for "Roundabout" and "Long Distance Runaround,"

whose singer's futuristic poise, high A

and strenuous façade of confidence

seemed to mean he belonged to the heavens, where there would be

no difference between the voices of girls and men.

I wanted to sing about c, about optimization,

about hypergolic propellants and hydrazine,

the histories of rocketry and electricity

from amber to Goddard by way of Leyden jars.

My panoply of inappropriate postures

included the extreme slouch and the backward lean,

accomplished out of overcompensation

and a wish to look as if I were watching the stars.

# Fifth Grade Time Capsule

Having given the sun and school

their expected, ceremonious farewells,

I can start to envision my future, my big reveal.

By that point everything I have kept

between my boards, in my polyurethane seal,

will have acquired fresh appeal

as evidence from another age:

a glitter-pen sketch of a tubular rocketship;

an origami-cricket notebook page,

a jadeite earring, the Boston Globe, and a scallop-

necked T-shirt graced with an entourage

of names in Sharpie, in graffiti script.

I know I am too young to date.

My answer to everything is "It's too early to say."

Though I am ready to lead a long-delayed

or even a buried life, I dream of the day

when I am decoded and vaunted, of a floral float in a parade

if not a chauffeured evening on the town.

The people who pick me up can never be

the same as the ones who put me down.

# Cloud Studies

# 1

Little vertical stripes—

the ring of nervous children at a dance class,

who cling to the walls on every side of the gym.

Then one line's white, so low on the horizon

above the harbor and above New Haven,

a tape measure on a flat map,

the other tufted, lofty, repeatedly shaped

like "product" in deliberately mussed hair,

and over that, nothing, as if to say, pay it no mind.

# 2

Massive non-replicability problems. The field

has taken a bad methodological turn

that makes even foundational results unreliable.

One nor'easter after another

ice crystals up high

whose sparkle distraction

glow

sunset shimmer sublimity

logic or lot

has set a bar so high nobody can clear it.

What's up? A place that's way, way overhead.

We will have to reinvent our views

our angles our tint our sense of when you be the judge

before we can look up that way again.

# My 1983

When I told Marina I liked her new striped tunic

but there was a hole in her armpit, under her sleeve,

I thought I was making a generous, helpful gesture,

an appropriate social move.

That was the year when we studied the Great Depression,

the business cycle, and macroeconomics.

Companies grew by meeting familiar demands,

or else by spreading news about new pleasures.

I wanted programmable gloves that could make you bionic,

whose workings I laid out in series, in graph-paper pictures;

I diagrammed volts and resistors, tongue-and-groove,

the difference between graphic novels and newspaper comics,

also a parallelogram-based function for love.

I gave a whole series of ten-minute lunchtime lectures

about linguistics to playground structures. "Steve,"

my favorite teacher told me, "you'll probably use

those theories someday and your future colleagues will thank

you for all of them, but we'd like you to think

about what might be interesting to your friends,

not just about what's interesting to you."

# Black Raspberry Canes

No more than three deep in the Tupperware bucket; that way

a few handfuls fresh from their twigs would ride

downhill without crushing one another and stay

distinct amid their glossy

tiny reticules, their black-on-black embossed

like ridges on an alligator hide.

The longer I waited the riper they got,

as long as I kept track, as long as I had not

waited too late in the day; then I found dots,

scabs, stems, pale caps or buttons, bird-eaten or parched.

Nobody, my father said, could get so many

scrapes and scratches accidentally:

without them I probably would not have liked it so much.

Here was a part of nature

no one else would want to touch.

The berries came off when pulled gently,

between middle finger and thumb.

The first ones to look ready evidently

had no source of shade, and nothing to come

between their clusters and the close attentions

of the unrelenting sun.

# First Kiss Stephanie

Gummi candy, passed back and forth, and slightly stale.

"But if I did like boys—"

# Taboos at Twelve

As well as feeling adventurous

I am sad

when I pad

my bra, or my imagined training bra,

because there's no future in it:

there might never be any more there than there is now.

I never asked anybody when to begin it,

but learned about it first by playing "I Never."

However,

I was freed

when I peed

my pants, or panties,

or whatever you call those;

if I could break that rule

then I could break any rule,

so the rules I follow must all be rules I chose.

# Esprit Stephanie

The hard work of appearances disappears

into the apparent effortlessness, and the loose three-quarter sleeves

of trying to become what other

people, your friends, your real friends, are convinced that you already are,

like trying to follow the pale fleck of a small plane,

or a big plane far away.

Sweatshirts big enough to hide half a person

hide behind their modular words,

and leggings. Where two or three strangers gather

together, sandbar: we are migratory birds,

temporarily almost aloft, almost fluorescent, in a 1983

of lemon-yellow possibilities,

things I might very insistently wish to be.

Only an eyelash separates me from reason,

from the coveted role of pretty-to-geeky liason.

To be good, to be

a good girl, is to pile up

credit you have to use up

before nobody else remembers you earned it.

There was a lesson in variability here, and in the history

of stencils, but I am not the girl who learned it.

When I got here first I looked around, and around.

I would like to compare my own growing up

to sand, and you and you to solid ground.

# After Callimachus

Half of me—an intangible half—is alive;

the other part has gone I don't know where—

either it's dead, or it's lost in what it calls love.

Actually it's a flighty tween

delighted by jelly shoes. "Keep your eyes

on the printed page; stop playing with your hair,"

I tell her, "and put down your portable screen!"

No use. I'm supposed to profess

that maturity is a gift,

but I don't believe it, or else I don't care.

I amble the library stacks and get lost in YA;

I want to go home, paint my nails until they iridesce,

clamp on my headphones, and pray to Taylor Swift.

# The Cars' Greatest Hits

for Timothy Alborn

When everything is artificial, everything

is equally sincere.

I was a ridiculous child,

tall tree made of cloth in my ear.

I got a hold on you, you're all

I've got tonight, you might think I'm delir-

ious, but all I want is you—

How the rankest cliché can please if you can

put yourself where it's what you hoped to hear.

Hexagonal drum pads, Pac-Man tones and tunes

as slick as waterslides

in a summer New England characterized

by who's got a crush on who,

lo-res graphics and kisses on acrylic collars

presented as mysteries to revere—

although you can't go on

thinking nothing's wrong is right

enough, if you have the right shades,

if you let somebody else steer.

If you synthesize your confidence, the more

you make up the less you have to fear.

Thank you for making 1984

as good as any other year.

# Mean Girls

after Baudelaire

In twos and threes on bedspreads the color of sand

Anywhere in suburban America they turn

Their parallel painted toes to the horizon

Finding a target almost without knowing it hand

On hand together as on a hand-drawn

Ouija board they select

A number to dial a name to call and deflect

The reputation that would land on them

They betray their confidences with confidence

Some of them used to walk through the last wild stand

Of maples behind the cul-de-sac snapping the saplings

Calling each other crybabies they mock experience

And mock my lack of experience

Their net composed of telephone cords

Night after night brings up ghosts

Lantern fish and anglerfish with their intense

Lures are not more fit more deftly set

For such secretive nights such high-pressure atmospheres

Such canticles of devotion to amoral gods

Some of them open the liquor cabinet

In an otherwise empty household and discover

The pleasure of Limoncello and headachy sleep

Some of them mock me for paying

Too much for a sparkly tunic or for looking cheap

They say your black bracelets and grave

Demeanor augur solitary nights

But your slutty hoop earrings must hurt You liked

The right boys but in the wrong order You called it a rave

But it was not a rave You are too good

An accessory kiss-off show-off You disgust

Our modesty You have nothing to show They place air quotes

Around your life so you learn not to trust

Yourself any more than they trust

One another because you still crave

Their pathetic and fleeting attention O monstrous martyrs

With your emerald contact lenses O terrible saints

Of hypocrisy penlites and brave

Cursive in sealed envelopes You understand

How some of us you reject will never forget you

We will grow up to study your mistakes

As means of navigation You wanted to keep

Us from becoming like you but we will not let you

# My 1985

I wasn't a math star, but one or two of my new friends were.

I liked to work into casual conversation

fusillades of words like nexus and tensor.

The counselor from the department of recreation

said I had the voice of an angry thirty-year-old.

I thought I had a "penetrating gaze";

kids thought I was staring at them. I had to be told.

After that, I imagined I lived on the moon for two days;

I stood out and hid there, a demented sentry

from an awkwarder parallel world, a young Bizarro.

On our class trip to the beach and the World of Tomorrow,

the boys were igneous. I was sedimentary:

I set out to lie with the other girls on the low dunes

before the morning heat got metamorphic.

They folded their towels and moved off, so I closed my eyes

on the hypothesis that it would make me calmer.

In the talent show, I played piano for Annabelle's show tunes

(we rehearsed extra for passages marked "improvise")

then sang "Take a Pebble" by Emerson Lake & Palmer.

They thought I was caterwauling. I thought I was Orphic.

# Fairy Story Stephanie

After I pricked myself

in my ring finger, deliberately, with a pin

because I wanted to feel something in my own body

that I had done on my own, I couldn't

sleep for a week, or not

for more than an hour at a time.

I was the sun in June; I was ready to set,

all amber and solar gel, and me craving the lead.

I want to be found but I wanted to be hard to find.

I have the longest lashes and the least patience,

and if strangers admire my powers I won't mind

having to stand forever, waiting in line.

I stole a shiny cylinder

of cucumber lip gloss from the CVS,

a serpent's tooth from the leaves of our beech tree.

Until recently

I could not tell any difference

between "I want to meet people like me,"

"I want people to like me,"

and "I want to go out of my way to meet people like me

except that I want there to be nobody like me,

only a mirror in air

and a series of shimmery alien sympathies.

Thank you for all the time that you and your friends

let me pay attention to me paying attention to me."

# Herring Gull

I always look hungry. I always look the same.

To tell me apart from my brothers you might have to trace

the sunset-orange spot on my beak as I stay in one place,

or tag my heel or say my given name.

In a position of confident wariness

easy to take, or mistake, for weariness,

my head flicks back and forth like a swivel chair

in need of lubrication or minor repair.

I would be graceful, somewhere.

I want to persuade myself that I don't care.

I decline to compete with your kites, which can go far higher,

but cannot change direction on their own.

Nor can they stay—I have seen them flee, or expire—

if their companions leave them alone.

The froth of the whitening surf can match the tint of my oversize breast,

my overbalanced, exploratory tail.

Though I can appear

as shaky and awkward as the reversed

banner unfolding behind a propeller plane,

my confidence is real.

Beyond that I can't say just how I feel.

To catch me at rest,

you must wait all the hours of my working day and then add one.

No human being has seen my nest.

That doesn't mean I never have, or had, one.

# Electrical Flora

for Elizabeth Treadwell

flowers of smoke

who put the ear

in spirit the eye

in surprise

who obscured

the hiding I

in annelise or analyse

we parents take care of whomever

we used to be

who put the host

in ghost

flowers of mist

perhaps an erasable

kiss

not to know if we want

oblivion

or something finer

sniff this bouquet

then say whether

you'd rather

be minor

flowers of osiris

and other stories in which

dismembered daddies obviously come back

thanks to the will and recognized labors

of mommies who never

have time to do anything else

flowers of no

to be happy

is to be vulnerable

sadness is amour

or armor

know who you're sad for

flowers of spring

from underneath the berm

to open meticulous sedimentary nest

or if we change kingdoms then

the message when the epicotyl

arrives

I live in midair

I greet you from there

# My 1986

I painted all ten of my toenails with Liquid Paper

then followed my father's injunction and scraped it all off.

The girl I admired second-most in the world

knew how to win any argument, and how to spin,

between thumb and index finger, a ballpoint pen.

I dated her best friend for almost exactly six hours

before she broke up with me over the cordless phone,

explaining, correctly, that I had turned into her shadow.

I failed to assemble, from papier-mâché and duct tape,

a glowing, foot-long, love-potion-dispensing flower

for our production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

We used a green wire. I never made props again.

That summer, I peered at the populous universe

through bangs and swaths of hair I tried to comb

and could not comb. I believed I could really fit in

with hippies, if only I met enough of them.

In my late night aerie, my upstairs writer's retreat,

I typed my ten-page poem about a dour,

shy angel confused by his runaway body.

I put an alliteration in every line

as a way to define my own verse style,

along with adapted prose from the character study

I wrote longhand in 1985,

when I felt sure that only if people unlike me—

girls, for example—would read it could the time

it took to revise it ever seem worthwhile.

# Water Strider

I could look down on myself, if I let myself

reflect on my reflection endlessly,

and make a depression of every sunny day.

Instead I try hard to stay still,

to look as if I could do better than to will,

in the deaf heat of summer, this unending listening

to the hum of the scrim of beige over chlorophyll.

The longer I stay up, the more difficult

staying up gets, and the easier it looks,

as in most arts.

I view the lucid surface I inhabit

less as home than as a second skin.

Yet I have an appetite. I have mouthparts.

When I detect a dragonfly I invert

myself and break the meniscus to grab it.

On so many other ponds

stand entities much like me

though I cannot be moved to greet them as kin.

It would take more time

than you have for me to explain why I never fall in.

# Gymnastics Stephanie

I am in at least two sorts of race with my body, where "with" means both "riding in and by means of" and "against, viewing it as a competitor": what can I get myself to learn to do and to do as soon as possible in the competitive moment or minute or day or month or calendar year before its changes take the willingness or the supposedly fearless patience (whatever that means) or the ability away

practice practice practice practice look at me practice don't look at me head over

head over heels over head over heels and practice practice

whether any of the people watching me who have not done the things I do know what I can do or what I have been trying to do or how hard it can be or how easy it seemed before I knew what I was doing not that I know what I am doing now

practice beyond the interminable practice might be the effortless practice practice

or apparently effortless practice or something like joy

only my peers understand me (if they do) maybe I have no peers

to prepare for years to concentrate for the entirety of a life

(short as it seems to adults) to see eternity as a warm-up and a walk-through

for a minute and a half to be and to show what you are

over and steady two hurtles flic-flac this is what you had practiced practice practice

practice practice practice practice practice practice practice practice practice practice

to have become someone who has to be only what you show the world

that's what you are so soon it will be what you were

maybe someday I can have a move named after me

the rotation the rounded arc the stick that casual fans and families know

the return from infinite vertical space into human time

what is amazing to amateurs has to become

second nature no marvel a stopwatch to me

two hurtles flic-flac this is what you had practiced practice practice practice practice

practice practice practice practice practice practice practice practice two folds more

there used to always be a balance beam in my dreams

and the sensation of turning over and over into the Amanar space

the pale blue and all too exciting wish never to land

to have become someone who has to be only what you show the world

that's what you are so soon it will be what you were

# Cicadas

They want it to be the same thing

to be born and to turn seventeen.

See how long they waited,

how similar they are

to what they were.

Stridulation is an educational

name for their repetitive song

that does not sound, to outsiders, like music at all.

Litterbugs, shutterbugs, clicking practitioners

of non-attachment to what was their skin and their clothes—

It took such time

before they could look you in the eye,

and make an impression beyond the asynchronous

husk or mask of what they used to be.

As you sweep the rest of them off

the hood and front seat of your car, your porch, hat brim, etc.

remember why they can't help but leave

these hollow parts that were not so much theirs

as them.

We are already done. It wasn't fair.

We will bury ourselves

again, after our one

ride through your duplicitous, temperate air.

# My 1987

I listened to boys I no longer wanted to know

debating the hotness of movie stars, but I

wanted nothing more than my hand in a training bra.

Once I told Annabelle, over the phone, that I loved her,

I hurtled downstairs to play Billy Joel on our spinet,

which I did, beaming or grinning, until dinnertime.

I had another life, in which I wore plate armor,

and another other life, which I preferred,

where I wore a form-fitting tunic and Mary Janes

whose contours I drew on graph paper, over and over.

In that life my chief power was reading minds;

though useful in battle, my power was tragic

on schooldays, because I had no way to turn it off.

My name was Psyche. She was melancholy,

with oversized eyelashes. She, in turn, wished she could fly.

I told myself that I would tell myself years later

that this was how I saw myself, back then.

I felt that I had become "unstuck in time,"

like baffled, wise Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five.

When I heard a trio of seniors who wore

black jeans and Dr. Martens and janitor's-key-ring chains

say they wanted a keyboard player, I put down my spoon

and sprinted across the lunchroom to tell them that I

could play the piano, and would get a keyboard soon.

# School Smoking Lounge Stephanie

How many other bad habits

will I acquire while I am still

"too young to know any better," supposed

to remain obsidian, changeable, naive

(a creature of glitter, impatient for November dusk)

knowing already that sooner, rather than later,

I would do better by learning to give them all up?

# Palinode with Study Guide, Spackling Knife, and Sewing Kit

Let the record—if

there is a record—show

how much of it, after a certain age, was delight:

the virgin daiquiris on New Year's Eve

and staying up till two, and other convivialities

around paintbrush, scrim, plywood, tacks, and drills

behind the scenes behind the scenes,

the hour on the telephone attempting to decode

"Ask" and "Panic" and (hardest of all) "Golden Lights"

and then the hour trying to decide

whether we spent too much time on the phone,

and the pushbutton desk-set answers for which we received

a sport's immediate rewards

that quickened us all in turn, and the sprawl

on Fridays when we occupied the whole

of the carpeted first floor hall, and the heroic

or picaresque car,

nicknamed the Green Hornet,

whose fearless owner gave us rides to school...

such parts of an early life

that do not require new frames—

that were almost just

fine as they were, or at least as they are.

# After Callimachus

Why do I write? Experience

and scientific evidence agree:

an otherwise intolerable load

of shame decreases by up to six percent

if told to even a temporary companion,

through a folded-up page at recess, a performance

on classical guitar, a palinode,

a Tumblr, or a hash mark on a tree;

fears diminish, at least a little, whenever secrets

are no longer secrets and enter the common

atmosphere, even as birdsong, even in code.

# Sadder

Honor existing commitments,

but don't make any new ones: that

is what my mirror image said to me,

the one in the passenger-side

sun-visor's fold-out

mirror that never sleeps—

If you hold to the highest standard

everything people have made,

eventually you will love only unimproved nature,

says the corrosive breeze; and wish-fulfillment

is the hidden

goal of every poem,

except when it is the obvious

goal, in which case the hidden

goal is something like learn

how to live in this world. Whatever

matters cannot be created,

says the false harbor,

though it can be easily destroyed—

Oh sad-hatted midday pedestrians

in nearly frozen air

on the two-lane road before the ocean

in Barrington, where the sea-wind-

tolerant shrubs encroach, and industry never was,

and nothing is sweet and everything is salt

and the author of String Light and ShallCross

no longer has your back—

each grain could be the last

in an arc whose end we know

and all the far whitecaps are rescue hounds who want

to run as fast as they

were once rewarded for running, and will not run,

or not with such enthusiasm, not ever again.

# A Nickel on Top of a Penny

after César Vallejo

I am going to disappear in Belmont,

after taking a walk in intermittent rain.

I will vanish one day in Belmont—don't correct me—

on a warm day like today, a Thursday, in fall.

I know it even more than I know how we all want

contradictory things, like security and excitement,

immortality, hang gliders, gumdrops, a home, and all

the space in the world—Eden, Paris, Tokyo, Cockaigne.

My writing hand hurts. To the good friends who asked me to dinner,

I'm afraid I should tell you not to expect me.

When you set the table, say, "Stephanie couldn't be here,

although we were good to her; we gave her presents

for Christmas and such; we answered most of her letters,

importunate as they became; we tried not to offend her;

we sat through her chatter about piano lessons,

and telephoned her in the midst of a snowstorm last year.

We think we could not have treated her any better.

We never believed she'd simply disappear."

# Advice from the Lights

If you don't get too close to people you can't disappoint them,

which would be so much worse

than letting them disappoint you.

To the extent that you gain

a perch that means other people look up to you,

to just that extent you can never

tell them how you feel.

You can warble, or

follow a siren, or a Shenandoah

vireo, into the shade, or take

advice from the lights: be

a child, or be like a child.

You will want for nothing, and you will never be heard.

# Anubis

dog-jackal-god-judge

Follower-on. Latecomer. Always backward,

a turn of the ears, of fine hairs on the ears, of the head.

A finer sense of motion. An arrière-garde.

An interest in the future of the living

as it is figured

in the unsatisfiable

demands of the dead.

•

My chambers are lit from within, or else

from above, like

embers, unilaterally.

I study what you call spontaneity.

The life in which I can learn,

albeit after the fact, what all of you

have done with yourselves—going nowhere, seeing

every piquant possibility—

turned out to be

the only life for me.

•

Dog lovers, I have learned, have feline souls, requiring

companionship they cannot "find within,"

whereas the poor souls and pilgrims who look up to cats

admire their independence and amorality,

we ourselves being already

"guilty as sin."

•

I watch the gate.

Why do you not go through?

Then there would be no one to watch the gate.

•

Where would you place yourself?

I cannot say,

given the obvious conflicts of interest;

as long as I stay

at my post, without respite or rest,

nobody else can either. Not knowing is best.

# Paper Stephanie

I am less flimsy than boys think.

I can stand up with some help. I can raise my hand,

my glass or my bangle or my japonaiserie fan,

though never all four at once. I know

the name of the artist who made me and made my hair,

with its scribbles and angles, and my other hair,

with its Byzantine curves and its coils, and my other hair,

that I wore when I was a flapper. I have been cut out,

refolded, unfolded, and put back into a folder;

I have been lost and found and lost and found.

Someday I will be left in a cardboard box,

the kind loosely associated with shoes.

Should I fear scissors, or love them? Once

I was colorless, I was self-consciously artistic,

I was a fluster magnet, I was scared.

I rang my new telephone. I was the belle of a ball

where even the gloves were bell-shaped. I could not hear.

I did not look like me at all.

A pencil mark grazes my ankle. A chestnut

stallion, tilted an inch off the vertical,

propped on three out of four legs, watches over me

from the jury-rigged off-white lean-to of an envelope

that serves him as a bedroom or a stall.

What if I had a side you could not see?

Once I was interchangeable, then I was loved,

and now I am not so sure. I have been upside down,

my face in thick carpet, in coach and spring-wheeled trap,

my ballet shoes, riding boots, and brickle-edge tap

shoes circled around me. None of it hurt.

I fear misadventure, and yet I would like to be shown.

I fray and sag in my thick bustle, my tan riding skirt,

my mythical petticoats. Maybe I'll never leave home.

# Helium

Inhale enough and you too

can get light-headed, momentarily

forget yourself, as with nitrous, or choking, or sex,

which can also make people squeak.

Mineralogists say we are taking it

out of the Earth at an unsustainable pace,

forgoing industrial safety and physics experiments

in order to throw better birthday parties and make

acquaintances' voices temporarily high.

Untold amounts are made

each day inside the unattainable stars,

which thereby grow denser, and that much closer to ending.

We cannot make it here, though some of us try.

I know of a child so sensitive, so used

to having whatever would sadden or weigh her down,

kept out of her life, that when she came to learn

about the expansion of the universe,

its redshift like a great balloon

with no skin, no pop, just the fact of everything

growing, over time, ever farther apart,

she would drink only water, and took to her bed for a week.

# A Crime at Pattaya

The following year, in a highly publicized case, four transvestites (one a transsexual) robbed a Hong Kong businessman and others by first inducing their victims to suck on their nipples, which had been coated with a tranquilizer.

—Holly Brubach, Girlfriend: Men, Women, and Drag

I would do it again. I felt

paradoxically adult—

each chevron on each wave on that warm ocean

pointing backwards and up the pale twist

in the shadow below concrete stairs. I was led by my wrist.

There was a great oval mirror,

the hush of a closing door,

two earrings unhooked and a square plastic bottle of lotion.

There was a bare smooth shoulder, and suppler hands

than mine on the buttons around my collar and neck,

my clavicle, my sternum, and points just south.

There was an oversized rocking chair, and a rock

that shone like a wet star-opal around her throat,

her fuschia lips, her softer mouth,

and commands that could never have felt like commands.

She was a moonless night at the prow of a boat,

and I was a pilot, a ghost in the womb: I obeyed.

I woke up to mopeds, car horns, and particulate haze.

I had wet myself. I had slept for two days.

The consul had come and gone, leaving ill-fitting shoes,

but I walked away shaking and barefoot. I would have paid,

and happily, twice as much as I lost, to lose

my reason again so utterly: how could I choose

to leave this beach forever, this tideless fold

with its plain rice and its thin shade,

where for the first time I lost it all, got rolled,

erased, knocked out, taken for granted, and was not afraid?

# The Sun Rising

awake awake

diminishing

shade on sheets

sends lovers to their

bailiwicks & children

to their parents' haunts & turns

so many adults

from when

will you love me to when

will you love me again

maturity

means a bed that is

the reverse or revenge

of the princess

& the pea

when you dream

I don't know what you see

in me

# Royal Botanical

Edinburgh

From the top you can see the whole city, as if on a plate.

•

The big Chinese flora that are not quite hibiscus,

the pale striated blue of ghosts or gowns.

•

The wild gargantuan hosta

like the one that took over our garden,

big enough to hide

a kitten or a child.

•

A Japanese maple hunched over in full bloom

like an adult bending down to a first grader—

no, like Snuffleupagus,

all his shade still inside him,

now visible when cameras catch him, or when the sun shines,

above the oversized, gangly, overlapping

stalks of the yellow giant iris,

whose feathery inflorations are definitely—

no, definitely not—

the hue of Big Bird.

•

The daisy, or day's-eye. The black-eyed Susan. The egg

and whatever might hatch from that egg,

and whatever parent or teacher can tend

the egg, since hiding it is, by now, out of the question.

•

Eternal return: the scruff or fluff

across the back of the bumblebee

who picks and nudges her way across red clover,

whose wings like pedals and wheels

mean nothing is ever over.

Having been fourteen

for 25 years, I agree, and cannot tell

if it is a fact through which,

like the vascular stems, I draw strength,

or a truth from which I may never recover.

•

Plant better local flowers for the bees,

lest the rest of them get up and leave.

Dear travelers, dear

gardeners: do not ask us to go back

to an order in which you no longer believe.

# Pastorale

The beloved wool skirt, the beaten-down hooded sweatshirt

with its stamped-in unpronounceable band name,

the tasseled vintage spring-weight brand-name

cardigan with its ever-

wider lavender stripes, and other

woven things inertia tends to pull apart—

for such objects, it's work

not only to stay together, but not to look hurt,

to appear, though worse for wear, never-

theless worn out of loyalty and love,

so that we take, from the loosening fabric, what memory will give,

possessions we already trust,

ways to recognize one another in wintry weather,

and not (the sheer patch of silver

on the checkerboard scarf admits) that we were just cold,

that we dressed in a rush, that we are just

like shepherds with one sheepfold,

who have one cloak, and no alternative.

# Advice or Prayer for Airports

There are no lords

We should protect one another

Let the technology work

until it fails

Until it is free

to rust

Let each pixel and tap

on the shoulder show

us where we cannot stay

Where someone else

needs the fee

Let us be like

the insects that ride

in droplets

From one habitat to another

Bromeliad dwellers

Trumpet

Resilient tears

# Indian Stream Republic

No one should be this alone—

none of the pines

in their prepotent verticals,

none of the unseen

hunters or blundering moose

who might stop by the empty lodge or the lake

as blue as if there had never been people

although there are people: a few

at the general store, and evidence of more

in clean vinyl siding, and down the extended street

a ruddy steel pole the height of a child, its plaque

remembering a place called Liberty

at Indian Stream, 1832–35,

between the disputed boundaries

of Canada and New Hampshire, meant

as temporary, almost

content to remain its own.

Each household, their constitution said, could possess

one cow, one hog, one gun,

books, bedding and hay, seven sheep and their wool, secure

from attachment for debt no matter the cause.

The state militia came to set them right.

The legerdemain of the noon sun through needles and leaves,

revealing almost nothing, falls across

thin shadows, thin trace of American wheels and hands

for such high soil and such short reward:

the people... do hereby mutually agree

to form themselves into a body politic

by the name of Indian Stream, and in that capacity

to exercise all the powers of a sovereign

till such time as we can ascertain to what

government we properly belong.

# Écossaise

As you took a green apple and rubbed its round form clean

in the black cotton of your practical, scoop-neck top

so that part of the apple could almost

settle, or seem to settle, between your breasts,

seat 71B, British Airways 215,

the scent of your red-gold hair unaccountably

a bit like rose, a bit like rosemary

in the polymer-plastic new-car atmosphere of the plane,

I thought of the painting we saw on our last day there

of the Reverend Robert Walker, the delighted

minister of the Canongate Kirk

on ice skates, his tiny red laces

perpendicular to each other,

of the off-center, overturned Y that his tilted

body, hat, coat, and leggings made, black on black

on black on black on black, then rose on black,

and of the receding, or reticent, gray of the lake,

the innocence of his pleasure, his one-legged pose.

# Spoken for a Pair of Ferrets

Too serious

no longer, we

have learned to love

our restlessness

whose tussles left

us short of breath.

We wrestled with

the reckless flesh

that both of us

would test & test

then half refresh

& half forget

to use what's left

in each of us:

vitality

we live to spend—

to roll, unroll

& revel in

our toothed excess

of wildness—

would in the wild

be what it took

to nose fresh eggs

past lips of nests

or drag mole rats

from burrows. Where

we live determines

what we do,

how frivolous

or violent

we have to be.

Captivity

thus keeps us fresh.

Our arguments

are circular:

we love to writhe,

to form a wreath

or flare & tie

ourselves in knots

like ropewalks' nets.

Come play with us,

we say, except

you can't: wrong head

& body shape,

wrong tibias

& scapulas.

If we invite

you anyway,

it's just to tease

you for your lack

of torque, your

inabilities.

Refusing the

imperative

to work hard or

make more of us,

our nature is

evading nature's laws,

all over each

other or always on

each other's

backs, with half-

retracted claws.

# After Callimachus

It's hard work making people fall in love,

even harder to get them to stay that way. No wonder

my friend Simone has built, for the goddess of love,

an idiosyncratic altar:

on it, one tube of lip gloss, a charm bracelet, car keys,

a rental agreement for a basement apartment,

a doorbell, a star for a Christmas tree, a salt or

pepper shaker, the mouthpiece

for a half-size trumpet, a pill splitter, and under

them all, a folded velvet satchel,

in which the lucky couple

who stay together into a shared old age

can keep whatever other sentiment-

al objects they decide to save.

# Tiara Stephanie

If the root

of experience is humiliation,

a wound that the world (without sorcery) cannot make good,

what does the root do to hide itself from the full tree?

What is the root of mystery?

What is the difference

between a cry of pain

and a cry of pain,

and how do I pick up

enough sense to come out of the rain?

I shall stand in it this afternoon, letting my cotton T-shirt soak through,

right into my shorts, right down my new white tights

and the rain boots beneath them, like last-minute help,

delighted not to be dissolving, not to be made

of sugar and flour, keeping the dirt off my cheeks,

thinking "This has to be a dream,

I do not know whether I want it to be a dream,

whether I want it to have been a dream."

# Secondhand Flashlight

I have no say

over who or what turns me on,

only the power to make things clear as day,

or, at least, as a truculent dawn.

Once a girl brought me to a rave;

I was dizzy, then giddy, then woke up near dead on a lawn.

When I look back to my origins, I crave

that chastity, that darkness, but not yet.

I also scare skunks off and represent ways to look brave.

I can render the same silhouette

gargantuan or gaunt,

or shake and make it dance a minuet;

it's you who choose what I appear to flaunt.

When all the people around me are fully aware

of whatever's in front

of their faces, where all their acquaintances are

and how to find loose change they think they lost,

I sleep in my drawer;

I prove I am worth the $1.50 I cost

when the power goes out, and at parties with nothing else

that can distract a preschool guest

or coax shy grownups from their shells.

I might be the first thing a kid ever put together.

I do just what my battery compels.

Unlike my big brother

the limelight and my cousin the campfire, I prefer inconsequence:

though famous in culverts and attics, I would rather

play no role in public events.

I have never—can never—run wild.

Obtuse, hollow-bodied, confined to the present tense,

I'll be your lightsaber if you are a child,

though first and last I do no harm.

In bad dreams I see miles

of anthracite burn; in my best I keep somebody warm.

Sunlight to me is just something I get shut off in.

Having resigned myself to my fixed form,

I was surprised to escape the cardboard coffin

of the charity shop that sold me.

Though none of my parts can soften,

the humid summer air can still corrode me.

Pick me up; test me every so often. Hold me.

# Creative Writing

The sea on its shore, for example,

especially near high tide,

and the plain green pennants by the lifeguards'

scantily painted wooden chairs, poles posted

in pairs, like rhymes. SWIM BETWEEN FLAGS.

It's a safety thing

and therefore easily disregarded,

like the fox heads, tiger swallowtail

wings, horses' teeth, antennae and paws

in the clouds that convene or loom just below the far fence,

the fence that keeps the dunes

from spilling and falling apart all over the gentler

roads and beach-roses

below the actual beach. It is as if

they had something to learn, but something that no

human being can teach:

about limits, about the end

of everything visible, maybe, or about

the makeup of imaginary air.

Meanwhile there

are the distant preteen waders,

the scribble and froth of shallows,

the competition or hidden cooperation

recorded in the tracks of hungry gulls,

where everything

means something, but never for long,

and the clouds and the absence of clouds are both

clichés, like countable sheep

about to be shorn,

or only temporarily forlorn.

# Final Exam Stephanie

Please turn in or leave behind any scratch materials. You have now agreed to follow all the rules. Good girls will be notified sooner. Next year you are going. You have to look forward to until.

Like walking out of an uncompleted pencil sketch, an unprimed canvas, the torn-off end of a page, like being a bracket in the fragment of ancient Greek that I encountered in my best friend's photograph. Nobody

is going to report me if I break down, break up, break in three, like a bone left to us from beach week's campfire feast

like the page after the last

page of a comic book

like whatever takes place under the oblong

gleam on microscope glass

like the white space between the grays

of a birch branch shadow on snow

like the aluminum ladder in our basement

on its side on the cold concrete going nowhere

It's June. I have a new and golden pendant, a folding hand mirror, a calculator too. Its heft in my hand grins like a mirror pointed back at the sun.

What is this air, this space in which nobody rewards

me for conformity,

or punishes me, or keeps

track of my time, what I wear, how I see

myself, or tries to tell me what my name should be?

# Advice for Holding Together

Here is a shoelace

tougher than snakeskin

coarser than coats' wool

Under each spiral

a union of polymers

structurally analogous

To the transatlantic cable

To the supposed

progress of civilization

To anything else you can worry

between thumb and ring

Held together so that it

can work at all

by the aglet at each end

What you can't hear

may be deafening somebody else

What's almost too small

to see may just be far away

Be your own means

of magnification or microscopy

Become your own

indignity

# Tourmalines

I used to collect them;

they gather a charge under pressure, piezoelectric

(I was proud to know the word),

semiprecious when clear, pink or green; mine were half an inch thick,

striated, unpopular, cheap enough to hoard.

In science museums and gift shops I learned to detect them

amid the stacks of greater souvenirs.

At the Smithsonian's cavernous

Museum of Natural History, for example,

on the first floor, to the right, in the minerals hall

behind the apparently ravenous

wooden T. rex, I could pick out a thumb-sized sample

for the price of a Superball,

then wait in the rotunda with my peers,

sixth-grade boys and girls in puffy coats.

The girls put their hair up as if for a special occasion;

the boys slouched, weedy, scared.

The taxidermy elephant seemed to frown.

A few blocks down, the Democrats under Reagan

were trading away their votes;

they filed like visitors into the Senate, prepared

to watch the Great Society come down.

# Washingtonian

Snap and crackle of pairs of squirrels—gray-black and pale

in the middens of dying leaves before the ravine

that separate North Portal from Portal Street

is like the crackle and pop of the breakfast cereal

that dazzled a generation on TV,

though it was nothing special on the spoon;

and the news that a TV appearance

by your favorite spangled pop star was lip-synched

may vary in its importance or disappointment

depending on whether there is independent

evidence she can carry a tune.

As for the discontent in the silhouettes

of larches and beeches, trees that treat their lawns

as audiences for the prosperity

of those who lived there or live there today—

ask them what joy would replace

the joys they appear to erase.

Ask them how to imagine pulling up roots

where they have, or could have had, a chance to stay.

# Advice from Rock Creek Park

What will survive us

has already begun

Oak galls

Two termites' curious

self-perpetuating bodies

Letting the light through the gaps

They lay out their allegiances

under the roots

of an overturned tree

Almost always better

to build than to wreck

You can build in a wreck

Under the roots

of an overturned tree

Consider the martin that hefts

herself over traffic cones

Consider her shadow

misaligned

over parking-lot cement

Saran Wrap scrap in her beak

Nothing lasts

forever not even

the future we want

The president has never

owned the rain

# Suspense

A way of holding things up, as the Zakim Bridge

holds up the cables that hold up

the nearly horizontal wedge and grids

that hold the boxed-in traffic in its variable

progress north to Somerville.

It holds us taut. It stretches out our days.

Without its gates and levels, we would slip

too rapidly off and onward, towards the end

which is the only end

no storyteller knows, or disobeys.

# December 2016

Sea ponders and then

pillages the land

•

Tonight the supermoon

no bigger than a regular full moon really

but brighter

almost terrifying

not to be looked at directly

a lidless eye

•

I used to think

that all of us followed the furrows

of the same plow

but then the rains

and then no rain

the millipedes scuffle and scuttle in

the fading gutter-pan and tire track

the reaped field is an altar

overturned

•

Two magenta—no, two hot pink child-sized gloves

abandoned in a host of fallen leaves

by a chain-link fence

What is natural

•

Indoors the pet cat rummaging

making the laundry pile his ship's

galley his miniature ocean

knows something he does not know he knows

the fate of civilizations

fresh sandbox sand in the dewclaw

coastal erosion

or where the time goes

•

There is no machine

nothing works

it's the scene in Disgrace

where David decides to put the animal down

not because "his time

has come" but because everyone's

time comes and no one else will feed him now

•

There is no rule of law

except for what you imagine

which other people may then proceed to ignore

So say a tight-lipped prayer

to the goddess of second chances

wherever she renews her tasks

Civilization's a split wind a confidence game

put your lips next to a dead leaf and blow it away

while saying you hope

it will be there the following day

# Resolved

Not to come

between grain and gleaners

a child and another child

Bring your mite to the dusk

Do better than the best of all possible

government

in the worst of all likely worlds

Consider the sun as it rises

only

slightly over the moon's lip

turning the lifeless craters

from rose

to rose-gold

not caring

where

or whether

anything grows

No one has

to be told

# Fuzzy Golem Doll with 6" Keychain

Altneu Synagogue, Prague

Protector of children from boredom, of parents from fear

of not bringing anything halfway appropriate back,

I want to be chosen. I have seen,

week after week, cliques of visitors check

my price tag. I keep trying to count them. I keep losing track.

My grandfather and namesake lived for truth

or a word that meant truth,

and was killed by the word for death, and brought to life

by a collective wish for a dispassionate

lowbrow hero with feet of clay.

Whatever made him famous he did with his hands.

He may or may not have been able

to do a good deed,

to interpret, as well as follow, simple commands.

Once I belong to you, you can take me downstairs.

A queue of high stains on the wainscot serves to remember

the existential threat of 2002,

when the Quarter flooded, and the water entered.

Each wooden seat bears a brass nameplate. In the one center

of the sunken, holy, rectilinear area,

a cast-iron cage awaits cantillation and prayer.

What you inherit depends

not least on what you can make.

In my own recessed and featureless

interior I hold,

along with a spell or scroll

for strength, a rabbinical saying:

Carry these two truths in your back pocket

and take them out as occasion demands:

on the one side, I am dust and ashes,

on the other, The world was created for my sake.

# Concord Grapes

What would it be like to belong

entirely in your own body, or in your own country, or at

your own address? It might

be like these unselfconscious, tangled, each-

one-over-the-next-one Concord grapes,

hooked (as in hook-and-eye) on the chain-link fence

between our driveway and the next;

the populous dewy clusters

hang as if lashed

to so many miniscule masts,

or threaded and caught in the stems of their earnest

commensals and competitors.

Each skin gives its possessor neither shelter

nor camouflage, only a violet luster

that catches the eye. For such a wild

varietal to thrive,

let alone spread, it has to be

consumed. The state seal

of Connecticut, designed

in 1639, depicts

three poles, each supporting a hefty cluster

of purplish discs, over Latin

that means "Who transplants,

sustains." On each, a serpentine

red line—a thickening vine,

though elsewhere it could read

as a caduceus, or a dollar sign—

connects the grapes it does not quite entwine.

When the first Europeans to try Concord grapes

made wine,

they found it repellently sweet—

as if a less-than-competent

goblin or vintner had meant

to intoxicate children. So they drank

their barrel ciders and mashed these into jam.

Two hundred years later, Ralph Waldo Emerson thanked

"embattled farmers" for firing the grape-

sized "shot heard round

the world"; not many years

or compromises afterward, Julia Ward Howe

predicted the "trampling out"

of "vintage," if not the scavenger-mutilated

or putrefying corpses of Shiloh

and Andersonville, who "died

to make men free." Unpicked, the grapes

have a musky, or dusky, hue, especially

at dusk, although their promise of easy

separation from the stem is not

to be trusted; fingered, they often fall off

and into the thicket they made, as if

once ripe, they would rather wither

than give

pleasure to us, who have

taken more than our share. The English Romantics preferred,

when they were moved to speak of revolution,

a series of metaphors about dawn.

The motion-sensor-operated

lights that hang, and sometimes swing,

like tennis rackets, from the corners

of our eaves over the fence are always darkest

just before they get turned on.

# White Lobelia

Little megaphones,

we hang out in the garden center and gossip

with the petunias three seasons a year.

With leaves too small to resemble

thumbs or hands or hearts, too soft

for any parts

of our threadable stems to grow thorns,

we prefer to pretend we are horns,

cornets and alto sax, prepared to assemble

in studios and sight-read any charts.

We are, of course, for sale

to generous homes. Some of us have become

almost overfamiliar with ornamental

cabbage, with the ins and outs of kale.

Others have lost our voice

in a painstaking effort to justify our existence

as a perennial second choice.

Like you, we dismiss whatever comes easiest

to us and overestimate what looks hard.

In our case that means we admire

our neighbors' luxuriant spontaneities

and treat the most patient preparers with disregard.

We strive for contentment in our

hanging baskets once

we know we will not touch ground.

We tell ourselves

and one another that if you listen

with sufficient

generosity, you will be able

to hear our distinctive and natural sound.

# Notes

In poems that appear to hold details from my own life, many names and details have been changed, some real events combined, and some events invented. Putt-Putt Mini Golf, however, was a real miniature golf course and video arcade in Montgomery County, Maryland. The first three lines in part 2 of "Cloud Studies" adapt remarks by Jordan Ellenberg. Several people will recognize details from "Palinode with Study Guide, Spackling Knife, and Sewing Kit"; I am particularly grateful to Eric Meyer and to Sally Grant.

All the poems titled "After Callimachus" grow out of poems by the ancient Greek Alexandrian poet Callimachus. "So reactionaries..." grows out of the prologue to the Aetia (sometimes called "Against the Telchines"); "Half of me..." out of epigram 42; "It's hard work...," out of epigram 34.

For more on Scott Miller, Game Theory, and the Loud Family, the musical subjects of "Over Sacramento," please see www.loudfamily.com. Many of their records are again available on streaming media and as CD reissues from Omnivore Records; you can read Miller's own critical writings in his collection Music: What Happened?

In "Esprit Stephanie," Esprit, or ESPRIT, was and is a line of clothing popular in the 1980s, known for its stencil-like logo, and still available today.

"Mean Girls" incorporates imitations of Charles Baudelaire's (much shorter) "Femmes damnées." "A Nickel on Top of a Penny" incorporates imitations of César Vallejo's "Piedra negra sobre una piedra blanca."

Details in "Indian Stream Republic" come from Daniel Doan's study Indian Stream Republic: Settling a New England Frontier (Hanover: UPNE, 1997) and from the present-day town of Pittsburg, New Hampshire.

In "December 2016," Disgrace is the novel by J. M. Coetzee.

In "Fuzzy Golem Doll with 6″ Keychain," "Keep two truths in your pocket..." appears in the American Reform Jewish prayer book for High Holidays (Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur), where it is labeled only "Chasidic, 18th century"; Martin Buber, in Tales of the Hasidim, attributes it to Rabbi Simcha Bunim (or Bunem or Bunam). "The world was created for my sake": Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5; "dust and ashes": Genesis 18:27.

"Concord Grapes" draws on Sarah Oktay, "Native Divine Vine: Nantucket's Fox Grape," Yesterday's Island 38:3 (May 2008), readable as of early 2017 at <http://www.yesterdaysisland.com/2008/features/foxgrape.php>.

# Acknowledgments

Many poems in this book have appeared in journals, on websites, or in anthologies (sometimes in earlier versions, or with different titles). I am grateful to them, to their staff members, and to their editors:

The Account, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, The American Scholar, The Ampersand Review, Aspasiology, The Awl, The Believer, Blackbox Manifold, Blue Earth Review, Boston Review, Copper Nickel, EOAGH, Five Points, Free Verse, The Globe and Mail (Canada), The Iowa Review, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, HiLobrow, John Donne and Contemporary Poetry (Palgrave, 2017), Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Lit Hub, Locomotive (Armenia), London Review of Books, Luna Luna, Michigan Quarterly Review, Nat Brut, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Ocean State Review, The Paris Review, Partisan, PN Review, Poems for Political Disaster (Boston Review, 2017), Poetry, Prac Crit, Prelude, Provincetown Arts Journal, Sport (New Zealand), T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Vetch: A Magazine of Trans Poetry and Poetics, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Washington Post, The Wolf.

Thanks of a special order go to Marisa Atkinson, Katie Dublinski, Fiona McCrae, Jeff Shotts, and everyone else at Graywolf Press; to my colleagues at Harvard University and at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch and in particular to the relevant chairs at those institutions, James Engell, James Simpson, and Paul Millar; to Blue Flower Arts; to Boston Review editors and staff; and to the Guggenheim Foundation.

Poems with "Stephanie" as part of the title, as well as the poem "Mean Girls," were previously published in the chapbook All-Season Stephanie (Minneapolis: Rain Taxi Editions, 2015), which also includes illustrations by Eowyn Evans and poems not collected here. Special thanks to Kelly Everding and Eric Lorberer.

For other help, advice, encouragement and assistance—emotional, literary and practical—directly reflected within poems and in the ordering of this book, I am deeply grateful to: Sandra Beasley, Alfred Bendixen, Susan Bianconi, David Blair, Lucie Brock-Broido, Sandra and Jeffrey Burt, David Caplan, Timothy Donnelly, Mark Doten, Jordan Ellenberg, Jonathan Ellis, Josh Glenn, Rachel Gold, Jorie Graham, Langdon Hammer, Laura Kasischke, J. D. McClatchy, Matt McGowan, the Nelson Patel family, Mark Payne, Trace Peterson, Chris Price, Justin Quinn, Dean Rader, Donald Revell, Michael Scharf, Michael Schmidt, Don Share, Carmen Giménez Smith, Amber Tamblyn, Craig Morgan Teicher, Helen Vendler, Mark Wunderlich, Jane Yeh, and Monica Youn, as well as to my students, and to the dedicatees of individual poems.

And to Jessica Bennett, our Nathan and our Cooper, every day, in ways beyond all counting.
Stephen—also Steph and Stephanie—Burt is Professor of English at Harvard University and the author of several books of poetry and literary criticism, among them Belmont, Parallel Play, Close Calls with Nonsense, The Forms of Youth: 20th Century Poetry and Adolescence, and The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them. They grew up in and around Washington, DC, have lived in Connecticut, New York, England, New Zealand, and Minnesota, and now reside in Belmont, Massachusetts, with their spouse, Jessie, and their children, Cooper and Nathan.
The text of Advice from the Lights is set in Adobe Garamond Pro. Book design by Rachel Holscher. Composition by Bookmobile Design and Digital Publisher Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free, 30 percent postconsumer wastepaper.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaBook


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« "Law's Sentiments" by West | Main | "Judging Corpus Linguistics" by Slocum and Gries »
"The Distinction Between Private Law and Public Law" by Dagan and Zipursky
Hanoch Dagan (Tel Aviv University - Buchmann Faculty of Law) and Benjamin C. Zipursky (Fordham University School of Law) has published "The Distinction Between Private Law and Public Law" on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Twentieth Century legal theorists – especially the American legal realists – provided vigorous critiques of the putative distinction between private law and public law, persuading jurists that the distinction relied upon legal formalism. In the latter third of the Twentieth Century, the law and economics school constituted a focused and dominant version of the legal realist capture of private law theory. By the 1990s, however, new forms of private law research developed, many of which we characterize as instances of "neo-realism." And philosophical theorists brought private law theory full circle, re-embracing the distinction between private law and public law. These views are depicted here as forms of "neo-conceptualism," and they are in many ways the polar opposite of neo-Realism. In this Chapter, Dagan and Zipursky each defends a view of the private/public distinction that falls in between the neo-realists and the neo-conceptualists. Dagan's relational justice theory is a form of neo-realism highly receptive to the deontological concerns of the neo-conceptualists. Zipursky's pragmatic conceptualism is a form of neo-conceptualism sensitive to the pragmatic and modernist concerns of legal realism.


We all know that Coffee is one of those drinks that some people can't do without. Some of us are just satisfied to get a cup from the coffee machine the moment we get to the kitchen, while others are always on the lookout for that perfectly brewed coffee that stays hot for hours. This brings us to our discussion on a coffee machine. The Cuisinart DCC-3200 to be specific.
DC 3200 is the best grind and brew. It begins as a food processor then they create a coffee maker that all of us would love to use. It is one of the most famous companies which have specialization in manufacturing various household appliances. This coffee maker brings comfort and convenience to the lives of people. It is easy to use that even a beginner can immediately use this product compared to other coffee makers. One coffee maker that has excellent feedback was the Cuisinart DCC 3200.
These features include a 24-hour timer, zero to four-hour auto-shutoff, 2 brews strength setting for bold or regular and settings for 1-4 cup quantities. There is also an alert tone that can be easily silenced if you don't want the machine making more noises than it has to. It is equipped with cutting-edge coffee technology to give you hotter coffee without sacrificing taste. Additionally, this 14 cup coffee machine allows you to select Regular or Bold coffee flavor Fully Automatic with 24-hour programmability.
Some of its other amazing features include 14 cup glass carafe, gold-tone permanent filter, BPA free design, brew pause feature and 1-4 cup setting which enables you to choose how much you want to brew.
Reviewers have given this coffee maker high mark all across the board with others stating that they purposely purchased this machine for its numerous features and its ability to produce high-quality coffee.
It is a fairly simple coffee maker despite its whistles and bells. In fact, all the coffee makers under the Cuisinart DCC line perform fairly well in this regard. Some users have criticized its controls stating that they are a bit tricky to figure out. Other reviews don't seem to have any issue with the controls though, in fact, some have praised its intuitive buttons. The display of backlit LCD is easy to read, large, and clearly visible which in turn makes it easy to program. The water reservoir which is located at the top of the machine has however received some criticism with some reviewers stating that the carafe leaks water particularly when they are pouring it in. The Cuisinart DCC tone can be turned on or off and has an indicator light signal when it's time to decalcify.
Cuisinart DCC-3200 oozes class in every part and section of the machine. It is pretty tall, approximately 17 inches. Some users have criticized this, stating that they are not able to place it in the location they prefer since it does not fit in their cupboards. However, despite its height, it also boasts of a rather small footprint for a multi-featured drip coffee machine and has been praised for its small size which makes it occupy small space on the countertop as compared to other coffee makers. Cuisinart DCC-3200 is made of stainless steel that appears light black in color.
In terms of performance, Cuisinart DCC 3200 is rated excellent and has been proven to meet the standard brewing temperature of 1950 – 2050 Fahrenheit for 5 to 6 minutes. It Ensures hotter coffee temperature without sacrificing flavor or quality Brew Strength Control. Most owners of this model have commended this feature, particularly those who love their coffee served hot. It has also been lauded for sweet tasting coffee it produces. It also rated highly for its quickness with cutting-edge coffee technology in brewing a full pot of coffee which give you hotter coffee without sacrificing taste.
"Bought this to replace a 5-6-year-old Krups unit with flaky electronics and a rusty hot plate. This thing runs circles around the Krups. Makes great coffee and looks nice on the counter. It does have a considerably bigger footprint though. Don't expect to put this under a wall cabinet and have room to open the lid.
This Cuisinart DCC-3200 model offers good value for money especially when it comes to price to features ratio. Gold-tone permanent filters, programmable timers and settings, fully automated and the list of good things goes on and on with only a few drawbacks. This is one of the best coffee makers on the market for a modern kitchen. I would definitely recommend it to anyone looking for a coffee maker equipped with a cutting-edge coffee technology.